Intel Drives up SSD Storage Capacity to 800GB

Intel on Thursday announced new solid-state drives with storage of up to 800GB, which is a new high in capacity for the company's SSD products.

The SSD 910 series solid-state drives are the fastest and most durable SSDs offered by Intel yet, the company said in a statement. The SSDs come in capacities of 400GB and 800GB and are targeted at data centers that need high-performance storage and caching, the company said.

The highest capacity SSD storage offered by Intel until now was 600GB, which was in the SSD 320 series for PCs.

The 800GB SSD 910 drive has sequential read speeds of 2GB per second and write speeds of 1GB per second. The SSD achieves random write performance, measured in 4K blocks, of up to 75,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and read performance of up to 180,000 IOPS.

SSDs are faster and more power efficient than hard drives, but are more expensive and currently have smaller storage capacities. Intel says a 910 SSD can replace multiple high-speed hard disks, and improve data throughput while drawing less power and saving server space. The new SSD 910 drives come with firmware that reduces data errors.

Servers use SSDs near processors for faster deployment of virtual machines or to speed up database transactions. For example, Dell's latest PowerEdge 12G servers use hot-swappable PCI-Express 3.0 SSDs to speed up databases. Dell claims the recently released servers can deliver up to 18 percent more Microsoft SQL Server transactions per second than hard-drive storage on predecessor servers. Dell also said that the 12G servers can also deploy up to 300 percent more SQL virtual machines per rack compared to older servers.

Intel's new SSDs work with the PCI-Express interface, and can also be plugged into PCI-Express slots on motherboards.

The SSD 910 drives will be available in the middle of this year. The 800GB SSD is priced at US$3,859, while the 400GB SSD is priced at $1,929.